Bring Back The Deutsche Mark: The Case For Parallel European Currencies

In the face of the European debt and financial crisis, Hamburg-based economist Dirk Meyer has a "third way": a system of parallel currencies.

A professor at the Helmut Schmidt University of the armed forces, Meyer is convinced that in its present form the euro zone is simply not sustainable in the long term.

He used an address to the Berlin Freie Wähler (free voter) association earlier this week to describe a standing European dilemma: on the one hand, the euro is presently causing huge economic problems; on the other it is politically and economically indispensable.

"If we go on the way we have been, it’s going to cost us somewhere between 75 and 150 billion euros a year," Meyer said. However, giving up the euro and returning to national currencies would mean "each state to itself, and the disintegration of the European Single Market" – and the cost of that, Meyer added, was "incalculable," although he estimated it at between 300 and 400 billion euros.

Hence, according to Meyer, the euro has to be here to stay, but it should be complemented by national currencies.

He characterized today’s Europe as a two-speed Europe, the requirements of which cannot be met by the euro as a single currency. He said the principle of the Single Market could only work if there were competing currencies.